Ultra Safe Nuclear • Hacker News Board

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#161

Post by z8rHZM8Svhu8hE2 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

steeve wrote: post #28

grawprog wrote: post #8

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad…

A few hints: - read about CIGEO - nuclear waste, once it has decayed, becomes metal in glass - nuclear waste is _small_, see [1], the nuclear fuel waste is the tiny red cube. - wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever [2] - renewables are more CO2 intensive than nuclear, fuel cycle included, see IPCC reports (there is a debate for nuclear vs…

- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever

Nuclear power plants have a lifespan of about 50 years, after which the reactor and other parts will be radioactive. This waste must be buried, will be forgotten and will remain there forever.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#162

Post by manfredo » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

noja wrote: post #141

manfredo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Forever. Uranium is a heavy metal, it's toxic regardless of it's radioactivity. 2. The US already has one [1]. Congress stopped it's opening, but it's sitting there built ready to be used. Europe also is constructing a disposal site [2] 3. Like I wrote in my comment, bury it in an area with no groundwater. 4. France does recycle it's nuclear waste. 5. We do, as I pointed out above. And for the second time, this wa…

> Forever How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?

Because there's not very much of it. The whole reason why nuclear is good is that fission of uranium has a much greater energy density than combustion of hydrocarbons.

And crucially this waste is solid and can be buried underground. Unlike carbon dioxide which is more or less impossible to store.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#163

Post by arawde » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #148

noja wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forever How can anything with a cost that lasts forever be cheaper?

Most toxic elements last forever. That includes the toxic elements in coal ash. Both coal ash and spent nuclear fuel need indefinite safe storage. It can be cheaper to store spent nuclear fuel because it's so much more compact than fossil fuel waste. Remember that the status quo already has a large forever-waste cost of its own. Nuclear waste is a trade off vs. other kinds of waste, and it is cheaper than the status…

Wanted to leap in here to mention tailings from minings projects. The gold that goes into a circuitboard comes from a mine which likely has a tailiings facility and associated dam, which is essentially an open pit filled with water into which tailings are dumped.

They're incredibly toxic materials. We had an engineer go out to the field and take a sample of some tailings, and after 6 months of being left in a lab, the materials had eaten through the stainless steel tube containing the sample.

It's not just power generation that has a negative externality in the form of waste. ALL resource extraction has associated waste.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#164

Post by atlasunshrugged » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #97

merb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

both your links actually say the following: 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity 2. onkalo stores the waste in iron that is probably corrosion prone well no matter the waste is a problem and humans can't handle it, because money is the problem. as long as somebody can make it cheaper the cheapest option is always used which probably can harm people. nuclear technology was N…

> 1. yucca mountain can not sustain a million years due to strong seismic activity Where does it say this? Here's the paragraph under earthquakes: > DOE has stated that seismic and tectonic effects on the natural systems at Yucca Mountain will not significantly affect repository performance. Yucca Mountain lies in a region of ongoing tectonic deformation, but the deformation rates are too slow to significantly affect…

As a Nevadan who is semi-involved in local politics, I can also tell you that Yucca is so contentious and such a career killer for politicians that I have no doubt that any Nevada state or local agencies would be under tremendous pressure to find any and all reasons to make Yucca an unacceptable place to store the used material.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#165

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

jka wrote: post #24

grawprog wrote: post #8

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad…

I don't know, and I have been wondering whether much of the evident pro-nuclear lobbying recently (it seems apparent on many threads here related to energy generation) might be due to the nuclear industry being in serious threat of becoming obsolete. I've harped on about this many times before, but the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power now…

> the levelized cost of energy[1] for renewables like solar and wind power is substantially cheaper than nuclear power nowadays.

The reason for this is that they're backstopped by fossil fuels. You install solar, it generates power when the sun shines and you burn coal or natural gas when it's cloudy or nighttime. The energy they produce is thereby cheaper, but can only satisfy so much of the total demand before requiring energy storage, which dramatically increases the cost. Satisfying the remaining demand with nuclear is better than satisfying it with fossil fuels.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#166

Post by Fooloo » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #125

zaroth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mathematically impossible. The entire world could be powered with 200,000 square miles of solar panels. Since 1990 we’ve lost ~2.5x that amount of land to deforestation, approximately zero of which was due to building solar. We have a deforestation problem, but it has nothing to do with solar.

Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.

Where there is forest there is rain. Where there is rain there are clouds. Where there are clouds there is less sun. Any large scale Oil replacing energy production with solar will be more efficient in places where there is no forest or crop production. Hence the threat for the forest due to solar is not that high. Also where human settle there is no forest afterwards but there are roofs, where they can put PV on. By the way there is a dicusion to make that mandatory.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#167

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #8

So why has nuclear waste become a thing that's not mentioned anymore? It was a pretty big thing in the 90's, now it seems to get brushed under the rug for all this 'safe' nuclear power marketing. It's mot just meltdowns and containment breaches that are a problem with nuclear power. None of the renewable alternatives produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored and dealt with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad…

A problem inherent in renewables is they depend on climate. Doesn't make for reliable or predictable power output. Climatic conditions could suddenly change and wipe out part of your energy capacity. Happened in my country and we ended up with expensive, rationed power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil#T...

It's useful to have an alternative that allows burning fuel in order to generate energy, just in case renewables fail. Nuclear energy is the best in this category.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#168

Post by cmehdy » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #159

cmehdy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help you if you don't even understand the scale of renewability of resources such as oil and gas, the ratio of energy extracted to energy put into the various kinds of machines that produce what we need to keep our energy consumption up, the limits to energy extraction for solar power, the lack of predictability and controllability of energy sources other than gas-oil-coal-nuclear, and the CO2-related effects…

You can't "help" me understand your claim because it is baldly false! There's an entire field that models different grids and transitioning to carbon free energy. Using fine-grained weather patterns, they optimize for various factors such as cost, by timing out deployments of renewable resources, nuclear, transmission, storage, etc. using projected costs over the next few decades. There are huge fights in the field,…

I'm not even sure what fight you're trying to pick here, because I'm all for renewables and energy. It's painfully obvious that no, renewables alone do not have the ability to cover at a low-CO2 footprint and continuous usage the energy needs that we currently have and that are, even with reduction of consumption in richer countries, bound to grow on the whole as population follows the models that indicate about 9 billion people being alive before things potentially slope downwards.

It's also not a bad idea at all to be investing seriously into renewables because despite the CO2 footprint related to the creation and maintenance of those sources, from a climate perspective it's the right bet in the long run.

But the energy density that you can extract from sources that are inherently at the mercy of a climate that changes are consequently limited and unpredictable (reminder that we are not fully able to predict it - unless you have the magical key to tell us with certainty whether we're really seeing a RCP2.6, a RCP4.5, a RCP8.5, or really any better model), the same sources that by the way aren't scale-able to many places on earth. You don't really bet on wind in the same places and ways you bet on solar for example, since population centers will limit the scale of your operations and weather patterns will limit the scope of what you can extract and CLIMATE CHANGE will change those patterns.

You might want to re-assess why is it that you are seemingly so emotionally invested in saying no to the only technique that has an extremely low death count per TWh, can be adapted to most places on Earth, and has an incredibly high and long-lasting ability to power countries.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#169

Post by mehmeta » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

What would be the ballpark cost for this reactor producing 5MWe?

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#170

Post by Manfredo_1 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #157

manfredo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke. First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl. The total number of victims was unknown for Chernobyl. We didn't know what the impact on cancer rates would be. But it isn't the 1980s anymore. We can compare the rates of cancer and other radiation related illnesses among the people who experienced Ch…

A number of people did die because of the Fukushima evacuation, though, through things like interruption of medical care. And if there hand't been an evacuation there would have been a few radiation deaths. The total is still only 10x the number of air pollution deaths you'd expect from a coal plant providing the same number of megawatt-years and very few nuclear plants melt down but lets be accurate.

The attribution of deaths as being due to evacuation lies on shaky ground. Many of these deaths are attributed to ambiguous causes like "exhaustion". Many of the counts for deaths supposedly due to evacuation are in fact just presenting deaths due to natural causes that occurred in the evacuation time frame. Remember, out of a population of 300,000 people, 3,000 people will naturally die each year assuming everyone lives to 100.

Certainly, if someone was tied to life support and had to be taken off to evacuate then that's a death attributable to evacuation. But most of the figures I've seen have counted people who died of natural causes during the evacuation time frame and attributed it to evacuation.